Digital Art Commission: Dele Adeyemo’s Trans-epistemic Mapping (Nuit Blanche at York)
In the Nick Mirkopoulos Screening Room, York University Keele Campus, as part of Nuit Blanche— Toronto’s city-wide, all-night celebration of contemporary art— Dele Adeyemo will be in conversation with Toronto-based journalist and urban planning scholar Nehal El-Hadi about his practice and their shared interests in the body (racialized, gendered), performance, Black geographies, and circulations of sand.
Text version below.
Art Gallery of York University (AGYU)
Accolade East Building 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3
Digital Art Commission: Dele Adeyemo’s Trans-epistemic Mapping
Dele Adeyemo (b. 1986) is a UK/Nigeria-based architect, urban theorist, creative director, and PhD Candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Adeyemo’s creative practice explores the ways in which historic legacies of slavery and colonialism are embedded in contemporary processes that shape everyday forms of urbanisation. His projects take form through alterative mapping strategies, installations, and interdisciplinary events. His work has been presented internationally at venues such as the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (2022), the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial (2021), the Lagos Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019), and the Venice Architecture Biennial (2012).
Through Adeyemo’s art practice and collaboratively-taught Architecture Design Studio course, he has developed a research process that he terms “trans-epistemic mapping.” For Adeyemo, this process is inspired by multiple cartographic methods and builds upon the typical considerations of an architectural site analysis—such as historical factors, topography, zoning, climate, and cultural patterns that are used to understand the context of a location—to work toward alternative modes of mapping that may include embodied experiences of Black life, non-linear conceptions of time, as well as Indigenous subjectivities. Adeyemo deeply engages with a location and its contributing communities to understand and convey the entangled nature of differing world views and the spaces and architectures they’ve produced.
Adeyemo has been commissioned to use his trans-epistemic mapping process to create a digital work of art that focuses on the site of the new Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery (GGYU). Adeyomo will use archival images, site documents, and text that register histories of the land and York University. To build upon this material, Adeyemo will embark on a short residency in Toronto from September 26 to October 2, 2022, where he will engage in primary research that includes visiting the xeriscape garden where the GGYU is to be sited, and meeting with faculty, students, artists, and staff of research centers and community organizations connected to York University’s Keele campus. Following his site visit, Adeyemo will continue conversations online, as needed, as he moves from the research phase toward the production of a digital work of art slated to be presented in spring 2023.
Please save the date Saturday, October 1, 2022, 7:30pm-8:30pm. In the Nick Mirkopoulos Screening Room, York University Keele Campus, as part of Nuit Blanche— Toronto’s city-wide, all-night celebration of contemporary art— Adeyemo will be in conversation with Toronto-based journalist and urban planning scholar Nehal El-Hadi about his practice and their shared interests in the body (racialized, gendered), performance, Black geographies, and circulations of sand.
